Page 255 - Premature Pessimism

Author Notes:

If you have a player like Applejack who reads a lot into everything, do them a favor and let them know when they're just spinning their wheels for no gain. There are times where this kind of intense investigation can really strengthen the party, and but there are also times when this just wastes the player's energy.

73 Comments:

The problem with telling such a player to chill out is that many times their paranoia is aimed at you so why would they want to believe your "Trust Me, You're Safe" line to begin with? :D
Out of the two GMs in my group, they take opposite stances on this kind of player:

GM1 - He says "You're just grasping at nothing" and the adventure ensures their paranoia is nothing more than a red herring.

GM2 - He says "You're just grasping at nothing" and the adventure ensures that every thing they said not only comes true but is used against them.

As one of these players, I can attest to this. In fact, it only makes us want to use copius amounts of digging even more.

DM - On the path, the party passes a farm.
Me - Perception check!
DM - Um... It's growing wheat. There's a farmer. No back to the rest of the...
Me - I go up to him and ask for his knowledge of (events surrounding campaign)
DM - You aren't supposed to be talking to him, but fine, he doesn't know anything.
Me - Sense motive check!
DM let's out a groan of years of exasperation.

Ideally, you randomly utilize both methods to keep players on their toes. Are they just being paranoid? Are they being Genre Savvy? Heck, use both methods at the same time. Have their suspicions turn out to be red herrings that screw them over.

What I love about situations like that, is if I'm the GM, I'll either just make stuff up off the top without bothering to roll dice or consult notes, and it'll become fairly obvious quickly that there's nothing there. It's no skin off of my nose. Eventually the rest of the party will realize the other guy's wasting their time, then peer pressure will push them back onto the right path.

Of course, I've got years of experience running off-the-cuff games, based around the idea that I'll have a general concept, and maybe a couple of actual villains written up. But what happens along the way is written mostly by the PC's. I just stay half a step ahead of them, and let their curiosity (and paranoia) fill in the situation and background. *Let* them explore the dark caves. I'll invent a completely unrelated backstory and even a whole adventure, if they want.

Eventually, I've had players forcibly restrain the "alpha" gameplayers from developing *yet one more* plot hook, because they're tired of me endlessly spinning up irrelevant plot threads. They'll eventually force the players to go back to the actual story.

You know what rangers can do? That's right. They can tame and train animals. Like squirrels. You think kobolds are bad? Kobolds can't climb giant oaks and drop alchemist fire, and leap from tree to tree following you. Kobolds are less impressive because they're merely small instead of tiny, allowing for more squirrels to dogpile you, and abuse the grapple rules. Against a hundred squirrels, you are lost.

1. During our group's first campaign, I made a joke once while the DM and I were waiting for the others to get to my house about the idea of an NPC named "Old Man Jenkins" with the first name "Leeroy." Later, when the party sorcerer threw away my old short sword (I had just gotten a new one), the DM said it hit Old Man Jenkins, and that with his dying breath he cried out "LEERROOOOOY!!!!"

2. This example is a little better...Early into the campaign, we came across a couple of male orcs feeding a deer. They hadn't seen us yet, so I assumed they were evil. Since I didn't feel liek getting into a fight and hadn't picked one of my languages yet, I decided to pick orcish and use my character's amazing disguise skill to make myself look like an orc, then use my amazing bluff skill to trick them into giving us the information we needed. It worked, but when I stepped out to greet the orcs, they said "pretty orc!"

Later I learned that they were actually outcasts who weren't evil, and that they spoke common. When I asked the DM why he didn't tell me that before, he simply said "you didn't ask."

As if all that wasn't bad enough, much later on when we encountered them for what I think was the last (and, thankfully, final) time, I found out they had known I was a guy from the start.

This was the famous "Murphy" line uttered on a D&D sidequest my players took up. The premise was that an elf city known for it's crafted jewlery saw a spike in road-side robberies when the Crafting Guild opened up a new trade agreement with a neighboring human city.

The party staked out the roads and found that what was mugging the merchants for the jewels was two raccoons, a boa constricter, and a fox. The PCs ambushed the critters, but let a few escape so they can chase them back to the lair.
The assumption was that one or more druids were leading the animals to robbery.

Nope! Turns out the animals were pulling an "Animal Farm" thing, having gained not only sentience from a spell a greedy evil Unicorn used on them (she acquired it from a (now dead) wizard), but the animals had picked up class levels as well.

Nothing like getting your butt handed to you by a panther with levels in sorcerer after getting softened up by a barbarian wolf. :D
BTW, the unicorn's name was "Unique" and yes, she had a pet purple dragon named "Thorn". ;)

on a similar Note in Just a Game one ofthe characters on a whim has some xtra material so gives the Rangers Squirl pack a circl that removes the feral status
Then the Ranger leveled, and thus the squirls

A little while later they took up class training...one ofthem became a Squirl Ranger

So after I get hit with some sort of "dominate person" type spell the party decide to go for a drink. It was basically a metagamed attempt at breaking the spell, but it turned into the best no-deaths session we've ever had, probably the first too.

So some mercenary punches our dwarf cleric, who then retaliates and a bar fight breaks out. Our rogue gets run both ways down the bar and takes no damage, I get dragged across a table and land on top of the guy, pin him under my knees and crit on a punch, knocking him out. I helped our cleric and our ranger deal with one other guy before taking to the air and careening into the fight between our rogue and their rogue, knocking their rogue unconscious and bursting a barrel of spirits, which I began drinking from.

At this point the barkeep runs out to get the guards and our party drags me out as they leave too and while they try to hide from the guards I decide to start singing drinking songs. The guards catch us and upon being asked if we were involved in the bar fight I turn to them and drunkenly say "No". For some reason they believed us and we went to another inn, where I got one more drink before passing out.

Cut to the end of the session following that and we're back at the other inn and I've managed to make peace with the barkeep. I decide to steal our rogue's potion of flying and pour it into his drink. Turns out it was a potion of delusion, so he begins drunkenly swimming around the room and I buy a room to lock him in. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. He unbolts the windows and jumps out, landing in a fruit cart without the driver noticing. We find out next day and I have to chase down the cart to retrieve a drunk halfling rogue.

To make matters worse I startled the driver, so he threw pineapples at me. I got critted TWICE IN A ROW. By PINEAPPLES.

After that we got him back, and in a funny kind of way, I saved his life.

In my old gaming group, we had a saying for things that game the GM ideas that generally weren't in out best interest. We called it "Throwing Spears". Every time someone said anything the GM was likely to consider using against us, that he hadn't thought of earlier, someone always told them, "Dude, stop throwing spears."

It comes from a sort of funny in hindsight incident with a goblin ranger. He was the only one in his tribe with class levels, and this, obviously, the leader. He had a strange little feat that let him perform a standard action, and attack, in the middle of his move action without interrupting it. We had wiped out the rest of his tribe when they attacked us, and he was running away, riding a large wolf. Our caster had been knocked out, and the only ranged character we had was out of arrows due to a vial of alchemist fire hitting his quiver. The goblin was also out of arrows due to us responding in kind.

We DID have horses though.

And spears.

Lots of spears.

So we start chasing him, chucking spears at him in hopes of taking out his last few hit points. The dice are not kind. Then one of us wonders "Why isn't he throwing the spears back?"

I'm reminded of a story of tempting fate, but in a good way, rather than Murphy's Law. So, my character, as well as a few main NPC's, are trekking into the Abyss to save a friend that had been captured by Fraz'Urb'Lu, the Demon Lord of Lies. Along with my character is his wife, whom insists upon bringing her pet squirrel. Note, this isn't an animal companion or anything, it's just a 1 HP squirrel. During our time, we had to run away from many things, including the Lord of Evil Dragons(1st edition monster, fun stuff). While fighting him off, the squirrel fell down a horrible pit, and I had to fly down and save him. All said, this thing was being..a nuisance. I had basically declared it useless and going to get us killed.

So, nearly the whole party is dead by the time we reach Fraz. Myself and my character's wife(who isn't much of a combatant) are all that remains, and were injured. Still, an epic battle ensues. Finally, he gets sick of it, flys up and starts casting a fireball. I have a few HP left, so I'm screwed. However, the squirrel had once again escaped and was on him as he flew up. The squirrel bites him, rolling a natural 20. By our house rules, that got through his immunity to normal weapons. Then, he rolls a Natural 1 on his concentration check and I get to fly up and actually win! That damn squirrel saved us all!

I think the closest I came to Murphy's Law was when a zombie bomb went off in the catacombs beneath a temple. The purple smoke was seeping up through some cracks into the main chamber above. I said, "I believe the smoke only reacts with the freshly dead, so as long as we get this dead cultist out of the way we should be fine."

Nah, Tucker's Kobolds is proof that there are players out there who are tactical morons. WHen it was published as an editorial in Dragon, they promptly got flooded with mail about how easy they would have been to deal with. One of the more common suggestions being Cloudkill.

Personally, I would have aimed at making a deal with them: Let us pass through your territory unmolested and we'll cut you in for a share of the loot. Attack us and we keep removing your leadership until you either get leaders who see things our way or you swear fealty to us.

And this is all in one campaign mind you...and just what i can recall off the top of my head. He has been forbidden from making guesses at plots, mystery solutions, or what will come next. Because quite often then he's wrong but later he is horribly, horribly right.

One time, while playing dark heresy, we were a very high level well equiped band of acolytes. We came across this mook, who we were trying to intimidate into telling us what we were trying to learn. Scared beyond belief he pulls out a las-pistol, the equvelant to a dart i guess, and orders us to back down.
We take a double take and burst out in laughter at this pitifull display. The mook is standing there flabbergasted and insist to be taken seriously.
I tell him to hand the pea-shooter over before he hurts himself, whereupon he fires at me, and crits, and takes about a this of my hitpoints in one lucky shot

My hubris may well never recover.... Ah who am i kidding, it healed up just fine

It's even worse when it's a cleric, and they have both Detect Magic, and Detect Good/Evil. I swear, we'd be so much further along if we didn't stop every few feet to do that. It did save us twice, but still.

The way I'm reading the last comment by the GM is "you're playing an adventure game, what kind of adventure starts by everything going along peacefully and without problems?"
In my group me and a few of the other players are of the mind that if we have two very different plans on what to do, and one is a certain success we go with the other plan because it'll be more fun to play. In this case the two plans would be "stomp the pest before it lays eggs" and "bring it back to town where there is food, warmth and plenty of places for it to hide just to show it to my friends".

"Sure, you can make me a character. " My pal Joe made the mistake of saying that to Ahjy, who makes fun of him constly. We're playing a Pony Tales campaign, in which two PC's were already dead before Joe joined and another is a backstabbing evil Rogue. Ahjy made a completely inept moron with completely useless skills and stats.

Cut to three hours into Joe's first session, and he's managed to fail a random effect roll so hard, he summoned a tugboat inside of a closet and crushed two more characters. All because he was too lazy to make his own pony.

This is why you don't let Raxon make you a character. I'll make you a talented pony of unparalleled skill... In something like crafting: banana hammocks.

Let's face it, you don't want your bananas to turn brown and mushy from the cold. Ponies need special hammocks to keep them warm. I suppose if that's not enough, she could also have a talent for polishing and waxing fruit for the market. Her favorite food is cucumbers.

My work here is done.

Oh, wait. She also crafts horn sheaths for unicorns so that when they sleep, they don't have to worry about ruining their pillows. They're also good for catching any stray magic emissions you might have during tumultuous nocturnal fits of restlessness.

"Oh Celestia, last night was so embarrassing. I was at my neighbors, polishing his carrot. It's really long and thick, so it was taking a while. I was distracted by how plump and juicy it looked, and didn't hear his wife come home until she stumbled upon us. Well, I was so startled that I spun around, and my banana hammock slipped off, causing my banana to slip its sheath. It flew up, smacked her in the face, and I'd apparently left it too long because it exploded, getting sticky white stuff everywhere. I panicked and ran. She just looked so angry. Won't be able to look them in the face for weeks. Guess I'll have to find somepony else's husband to service."

This was from a game I GM'ed (Jadeclaw), an anthropomorphic mythic China setting. The group is ambushed by bandits and it's an even fight.

One of the players decided to get tricky and managed to disarm the rhino, taking away his club. Then he found out the rhino was a better fighter with his horn, but it wasn't civilized so he usually used his club. Until some idiot took it away from him. Cue unconscious and badly beaten PC.

One time, Our barbarian went screaming through the hallways in the dungeon chasing a monster, and ran right into the room of a bronze dragon (barb was evil, btw), so he turned and ran screaming back to the party. I had the bronze dragon turn into a little girl and approach the party to spice up the adventure a little bit. The rogue called me on it, but I managed to convince the rest of the party that he was just crazy.

I've actually had RP-only sessions where literally nothing bad happens. Some of them were incredibly well-received, some were not, and it really just depends on how has been happening and whether or not now's a good time for a breather episode. But still, it's pretty fun as a DM to say at the start of a session: "I have no intention of rolling any dice tonight." I think I've failed in that task only once of the several times I've said it. (Character was caught trying to nick some stuff out of a paladin's foot locker, so the paladin punched him in the face.)

Also, I go in saying that *I* am not going to be rolling dice. The players still have to roll the occasional skill check. Granted, since the above munchkin Bard currently lives with a population that's about 60% Drow with the ability to roll all social checks twice against Fey-origin creatures, I might as well just give her everything she wants making the dice irrelevant, but it's the principle of the thing!

I've had game sessions that were intended to be real ones turn out like that. I've also had mini-sessions that were intended to be like that turn out to be serious issues. I tried to follow up on a minor sideplot and ended up with what we'd thought was going to be a major plot hook coming back to bite me that almost got me and the other two players present killed - and/or dragged to fairyland, which was basically equivalent. The GM rolled to see what NPCs happened to be present at the freehold (this was in a Changeling: the Lost game) - thankfully we got two extremely helpful ones who noticed we'd been gone too long.

To be fair to players like Applejack, my GM has a reputation for everything you encounter possibly being out to kill you. So it makes sense our group would dig into things that otherwise appear innocent.

Not to mention that for the seriousness the DM takes in his world it almost benefits the players to try and do this.

That being said, it can be fun to play the characters who have been through so many different variants of Hell that they have no choice but to suspect EVERYTHING!

This story seems relatively related to what we seem to be talking about.
In one of the campaigns I was running, one of the players mentioned in his backstory that his little sister had fallen into a portal to a strange sort of madness dimension, and that her loss had been the defining moment to set his character down his path - the 'I couldn't save her, I won't fail so again' moment. Halfway through the campaign, I had her show up.
Her name was Miki. WHen asked how she got home, she said 'Fluffy' saved her and brought her home. She then proceeded to gesture to empty air to introduce 'Fluffy'. The player - and the rest of the group - was convinced that the madness dimension had driven her mad, so everyone was careful to act like they accepted 'Fluffy' as real, even though she insisted on holding Fluffy's hand all the time since he was, apparently, scared of a lot of things, like fire.
Cue the BBEG showdown. Cue a long series of terrible rolls on the part of the adventuring party, leading to what is almost a TPK. BBEG aims for Miki. Her protective big brother - the party tank who's almost out of HP - gets in front of her to sheild her as BBEG hurls an eldritch spear (exact details of attack slip my mind at the moment).
Miki: Fluffy! Help!
I roll some dice.
The spear freezes in midair. It then snaps in seventeen places.
A Cthulite (very high level homebrewed monster, a child of Cthulu, classified as a mid-boss bare minimum and feeds on emotion) appears.
Party is shitting themselves.
The Cthulite proceeds to tear into the BBEG, forcing him to flee.
Miki runs up and hugs the Cthulite.
Miki: Thank you, Fluffy!
(Note: the Cthulite is a creature that looks like a mass of tentacles held together by liquid shadows, surmounted by 13 blood red eyes. And she dubbed him 'Fluffy'.)

Unfortunately, there isn't much more to tell of the story. The idea of a tame creature of that kind of power - not to mention it necessitated a Sanity check for anyone who faced off against it when it was visible - was simply too unbalancing. After all, it's a literal Elder Demigod.

I'm the guy that can figure out who's the evil guy as soon as the GM hints there is one. For instance, there was one horror-indie-game-themed campaign where whenever we stumbled into a room with innocuous things (say, bunch of stuffed bunnies) I got the rest of the party to say what they saw because every single time, half of us were hallucinating. Eventually, the rule was "whoever guesses the plot twist, has the plot twist bite off their head" which was stupidly unfair because they got a PENALTY for knowing what was about to attack them. That is why people get kicked off GM duty (funny thing, this person's next ten attempts at guessing the new guy's plot twists were all horribly wrong and ended up getting him killed when he guessed the boulder about to crush him was fake, when the pit in front of us was).

Shadowrun campaign, half elf with cyber, walked into a tavern. Once inside, I see 14 identical elves sitting in the same general area. "Send in the clones," I said. One demand for a fee and a gun-hand later, I've got a smart target machine gun with explosive rounds that takes 5 of them before I die.

I tend to put up lots and lots of red herrings into my campaigns, as well as events that have nothing to do with it.
Just to make my campaign world seem more alive and to let my players notice that not everything revolves around the plot.
My players sometimes still get confused by those things and look at me dumbfounded, when they followed one around again, asking: "What was the sense of this, now?"
Well, sometimes things just happen and enter the focus without a real reason :D

This morning, I read every comic you've made in this series. I'm in love with it! I've been looking for a group for a while now, and I think I might just want it to be pony based after all this inspiration.